How To Avoid Nasty Jenkins Sprawl

By Adrian Bridgwater, December 12, 2013

Visibility into Jenkins configurations with resource management

Continuous delivery Platform as a Service (PaaS) company CloudBees has released Jenkins Operations Center to (attempt to) provide an answer to "Jenkins sprawl" in development and operations teams. The product also aims to provide visibility into Jenkins configurations.

What Is Jenkins Sprawl?

If you're not familiar with the term Jenkins sprawl, CloudBees would define this as the predicament arising as development teams add more instances of Jenkins and end up creating siloed Jenkins configurations that proliferate.

As a popular open source continuous integration (CI) tool, avoiding Jenkins sprawl (with this tool) means IT operations and development teams could be able to manage all Jenkins resources, allowing them to reduce additional hardware purchases and assert more control over the development environment.

"As groups adopt Jenkins, each group maintains its own resources. If a group needs more resources, they have to buy more build node machines, even if there is excess capacity elsewhere in the organization. With Jenkins Operations Center, groups can share build nodes between multiple masters, optimizing existing resources," said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of Jenkins and architect at CloudBees. "Jenkins Operations Center has the same extensibility DNA as Jenkins, allowing users to build additional plugins on their own to handle specific needs."

The firm says that Jenkins admins currently spend a lot of time maintaining individual masters — but with its Jenkins Operations Center management is centralized. Security configurations can be pushed to individual masters by a central admin. Update centers can also be attached to downstream masters, ensuring plugin compliance and version consistency.

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